Links for 12-7-2017

A court in Wisconsin unsealed a report written by the state’s attorney general on the “John Doe” investigations that targeted conservatives. The report reveals the existence of a third, previously unknown, “John Doe” investigation where Government Accountability Board (GAB) employees collected hundreds of thousands of private emails and chat logs from Wisconsin Republicans. Investigators found these documents on GAB servers in directories labeled “Opposition Research.”

Regardless of what happens next in the CFPB [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau] matter, this episode illuminated a crisis of authority pervasive in American politics today. The dysfunction it laid bare tells us that we have forgotten what authority means and are thus no longer capable of identifying where it resides in our political system. The result is a post-political order that delegitimizes conflict and undermines the institutions on which we depend to resolve disagreement and forge compromise in a pluralistic society.